Threats batter chimpanzees as habitat loss, poaching and disease continue. A growing human population across the 22 countries of Equatorial Africa is also taking its toll. As humans demand more, chimpanzees get less -- Less land, less water, less food, less everything.

Conservation heroes like British primatologist Jane Goodall have dedicated their lives to understand chimpanzees in the wild and raise worldwide awareness about their plight. We stand with Dr. Goodall and others today in the hope that this proposal will ignite renewed public interest in the status of chimpanzees in the wild.

Since 2001, we have awarded 137 grants from the Great Ape Conservation Fund totaling $8.6 million, matched by $10.3 million, to support conservation efforts to protect chimpanzees.

We work with conservation groups like the Wildlife Conservation Society and Wild Chimpanzee Foundation-Africa. We also partner with local leadership and support projects in in 19 countries, in Cameroon in the Ebo Forest, for instance, or in Rwanda in the Nyungwe National Park.

The threats have only gotten worse since we initially added wild chimpanzees to the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife as threatened in 1976.

In 1990, we gave wild chimpanzees the full protections of the Endangered Species Act, and it is clear to our scientists that chimpanzees continue to meet the definition of endangered.

But in those initial rulings, we separated out captive chimpanzees in the United States. We wanted to encourage breeding of chimps, thus providing additional animals and reducing the incentive to remove animals from the wild.

So we said live chimpanzees held in captivity in the United States were not subject to the prohibitions that applied to wild chimpanzees. In other words trade, sale, import and export, and take of captive chimpanzees were allowed.

We recently took another look at those decisions and found that the ESA does not allow for captive?held animals to be assigned separate legal status from their wild counterparts on the basis of their captive state.

That’s why today we are proposing to list all chimpanzees as one entity as endangered. If this rule is finalized as proposed, the ESA’s full protections would be extended to the captive chimpanzees in the United States as well as their wild cousins.

This would not end private ownership of chimpanzees or chimpanzee sales.

But under the ESA, you would now need permits for certain activities involving both wild and captive-raised chimpanzees. For example, any sale across state lines would now require a permit. You would also need a permit to import or export a captive chimpanzee or any of its parts.

Biomedical testing that could harm a chimpanzee, or anything that could hurt, harass, kill, what the ESA calls take, would also require a permit.

The chimpanzee is said to share 98 percent of our genes. It is in our nature to protect and conserve this iconic species, and this proposal will help.

Action on placing chimpanzees on the endangered list is long overdue. In fact, they should never have been subjected to the cruelties they were forced to endure. It is an ongoing source of shame for human animals to treat our cousins so badly. Next step (not through FWS) is to save their habitat in the wild.